Tag: soulslikes

My day in two images

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video gamesLeave a comment

This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker: Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.

(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?

My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.

This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.

Two reviewlets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!

The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.

Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.

He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.

I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.

Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.

Next!

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

All right, FromSoft. I just strapped on my heavy shield and my bleedin’ stick and absolutely melted Promised Consort Radahn. What else you got?

#REVIEW: The Surge 2 (PS4)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

The PS5 hasn’t made an appearance yet, and I did a test drive by Best Buy earlier to see if it was reasonable to get the new TV brought out, and it … was not. I might take another shot at it after dinner, but I’ll probably just wait until tomorrow at this point. I did put The Surge 2 to bed last night, and it has the distinction of almost certainly being the last game I’ll beat on my PS4, since the PS5’s backwards compatibility is pretty universal so there won’t be a need to pull this console out of mothballs if I decide I want to go back to something.

Short version: 8/10, solid but occasionally garbagey. The Surge 2 takes the Soulslike tradition of losing resources on death, mild RPG elements, and punishing difficulty and sets it in a cyberpunk/nanotech future sort of world. As basically everything I play nowadays is a Soulslike of some sort (and the first game that graces the PS5 is going to be the Demon’s Souls remake) this was more or less right up my alley.

Strengths: weapon and armor variety is awesome, and the armor pieces in particular are interesting; each set has six pieces (two arms, two legs, body and head) and they can be mixed and matched, and each set also has a bonus if you’re wearing three pieces of it and a bigger bonus if you’re wearing six pieces, and the bonuses are different between sets– so you find yourself wearing three pieces of one set and three of another a lot. Weapons are varied enough that I never kept one for very long, although I definitely found myself gravitating toward the spear- and staff-class weapons by the end of the game, which both had good range and were fast. Nothing really looks like anything else, though, which is great.

The combat in general was one of the game’s strengths, although there’s a directional block mechanism built in that I never really got the hang of, and timing on blocks in particular felt sluggish a lot of the time. That may just be me, though as timed-parry mechanisms almost always give me fits, but I swear a lot of the time I’d hit block and my dude just wouldn’t. Sometimes that was due to being out of stamina, but by the end of the game my stamina pool was so huge that that was rarely an issue and I still had a hell of a time with timings.

The story is … fine. I never played The Surge and I never got the impression that I needed to; the sequel is completely standalone.

Less good: boss fights are challenging but repetitive, the game was buggy (I don’t remember the last time I had a game hard crash to the desktop, and this game did it six times) and level design was kinda samey and I had a hell of a time finding my way around. They did a good job of different levels wrapping around and connecting to each other in lots of places, with lots of shortcuts and secret passages and such, but the game’s color palette and overall look just didn’t really vary all that much from place to place, and there’s an event partway through the game that rips up the old map and throws it away, and after spending as much time as I had exploring and trying to figure out where everything was, having all that knowledge stripped away from me was really annoying. The trophies also seemed sort of buggy, and I’m convinced that I earned one of them that never popped for me at all.

The game also does a sort of cool thing after the credits roll where it shows you a bunch of stats that compare you to how other players did, both in terms of how many deaths and playtime in levels and to bosses. This was neat but I’d rather have had access to it in the game. There’s also a new piece at the beginning of New Game + where you pay through something that happened offscreen in the first playthrough, which was kind of neat.

This has been out for a while (every game I review has been out for a while) but if it slipped your radar and you are into this kind of game, it’s worth checking out.